M1/M2 Users: Experience with hostile and clearly ill-informed admin(s) here

[alL]

As I have been looking at the progress of various options for VIRTUALIZATION on Macs with M1 and M2 processors, I was taken aback by the way certain site admin(s) in this forum are responding / participating in threads.

First, this is an end user forum, correct? I would assume that everyone here should expect the knowledge, experience and skill set of community members to span a pretty wide range. So seeing someone identified as a site admin speaking to individuals in the ways I have seen is pretty ridiculous.

Second, the site admin I seem to see the most exhibiting less than charitable behavior in their interactions is WRONG. Full stop. It is clear they have little if any understanding of the ARM architecture and has decided to respond from assumption and an extremely uniformed perspective.

Seeing someone clearly ask about virtualization and see a "tech"-splaining version of why it will not happen and not simulating CPUs and that virtualbox is hypervisor that emulates pc hardware...

Hopefully, this particular admin will find their way into this thread (and will probably lock it as is their nature) but since I may have their attention.
1. ARM, as of ARMv8.4 (2019) has ENHANCED support for Type 2 hypervisors, prior to that it supported Type 1 hypervisors pretty well. (Just so YOU are clear that means there are extension present
2. Disparaging other applications in the same space because you DO NOT UNDERSTAND how (or why) they accomplish things your particular application has not *yet* is ridiculous. I believe you even intimated they manipulated screenshots... Seriously, I use many if not all the usual suspects providing virtualization on M1/M2 and one again, you are JUST WRONG.
3. Why are you chiming in to a conversation to not only add no value but also to put on display misinformation and a lack of understanding of the topic in which you are participating?

Anyway... This is really all the time I want to spend on this. I have attached a snippet from the freely available documentation for the ARMv8 architecture. Hopefully seeing a picture will drive home what has alluded you in text form.
Ban me, lock the thread, delete it as is what tends to happen when admins are called out. I doubt I will return because if you are an example of who can serve as a site administrator- that just reaffirms my choice of moving away from virtualbox and back to the commercial products.

Good Day alL

[mpack]

Sorry, your failure to understand basic facts is no reason for us to waste time rehashing this conversation. See the sticky at the top of this forum.

If and when a version of VirtualBox appears that runs on ARM then I've no doubt you will hear about it. Until then we have nothing to discuss.

[scottgus1]

I'll just add in one item here, if you decide to read this, alL, that may help you understand why we feel that Virtualbox won't work on an ARM processor in its present form:

"tech"-splaining version of why it will not happen and not simulating CPUs and that virtualbox is hypervisor that emulates pc hardware...

This is precisely the reason: Virtualbox does not simulate/emulate CPUs. It does simulate/emulate all the other 'hardware' in the VM. But not the CPU. The physical CPU gets into the VM directly.

So it comes down to: does an ARM processor speak x86 code? The answer is No. Not unless one programs in a translator (which is basically an emulator). It would be the same as if you and I were trying to talk together, but I only spoke Chinese and you only spoke English. Without a decent translator, we couldn't communicate.

Just the fact that an app is a hypervisor does not necessarily mean that it is also an emulator. Virtualbox is a hypervisor, but it is not an emulator. In fact, since Virtualbox is distributed in x86 code, not even Virtualbox itself can run on ARM. One would need to rebuild Virtualbox source code if possible, taking into account the differences between ARM and x86 processors. And one would have to add in a translator.

So though ARM may support hypervisors, nested virtualization, and all the rest, the actual hypervisor must be built in ARM code (Virtualbox is not for now) and the hypervisor would require an emulator (which Virtualbox does not have for now).

Users can contribute code and can rebuild Virtualbox from the source code. So there is a place out there for the "Virtualbox_alL" ARM-compatible fork.